A letter by Mr. Richard Fox from South Side, which appeared in the March 28 issue of The Chronicle, needs a response.

Mr. Fox makes the point that the Pittsburgh Jewish Community can no longer sit back and parrot the party line in support of Israel. I, and many others in this community, take offense to that.

We support Israel with our own thoughts and actions. The Pittsburgh Jewish community, within it’s own organizations and at its facilities, allows for dissension and discussion. We are not a community of Israel right and wrong.

The “anti-Israel” campus presentations are full of false statements, hatred at times and place all the blame for everything wrong in Israel on Israel.

Mr. Fox should have addressed his letter to the pro-Palestinian groups that are looking for a no-Jewish state solution. Perhaps he should suggest that they rid their schools of hate teaching, recognize that Israel has a right to exist, accept responsibility to end their acts of terror and rid themselves of oppressive and corrupt leadership.

Rick “Rocky” Wice

Squirrel Hill

Restrict gun ownership

In a tragic sign of our times, Americans have come to accept that lunatics with guns will routinely engage in mass murder, and we hardly bat an eyelash at such slaughter unless and until a sufficient number of individuals have been mowed down to make the story worthy of our attention.

In a period of less than one month, our nation has suffered the murder of four police officers in Oakland, Calif., a Carthage, N.C., man who killed seven nursing facility Alzheimer’s patients and a nurse, and the slaughter of 13 people at an immigration services center in Binghamton, N.Y.

Now, a deranged individual with a violent history, a belief in conspiracy theories, including anti-Semitic themes, and fearful that his precious guns will be taken away, shooting Pittsburgh police officers, three of them fatally.

Dare anyone suggest that a means to deal with this carnage is to restrict ownership of guns, to limit the number of guns one may own or acquire per month? Of course not. In the eyes of the gun fanatics who direct and control Congress and virtually every state legislature, the problem is that not enough people have guns.

The position of the gun proliferation enthusiasts is fantasy and it would serve to recreate the lawlessness, violence, and chaos of the Wild West.

Mass murder of innocents is a price that the nation is willing to tolerate in order to twist the Second Amendment into a form that would confound and disgust the Founding Fathers, who could not ever have envisioned a society in which myriad individuals with severe mental disorders and an inability to respond normally to societal pressures would be armed to the teeth.

Due to the gun lobby, it is easier to take possession of a gun than to secure a driver’s license. Placing the same restrictions on guns that we place on other dangerous products would not end the problem of murderous rampages, but it would be a partial and significant answer to a problem, which can only get worse if it is allowed to fester.